I’ve been meaning to put together a longer-form post on what great design portfolios and presentations look like, but sitting down to write is… hard.

My main rule of thumb for effective presentation design is show, don’t tell. I’ve seen many designers of all levels fall into the trap of over-explaining with text in their slides while also talking and it’s overwhelming. Viewers can only really focus on either what you’re saying or what you’re showing—not both. It’s more effective to keep the explanations to your talk track while using visuals to show the other part of the story.

One of these days I’ll find the motivation to write more on this. Until then, feel free to ask me questions or for feedback on your portfolio on Bluesky or Mastodon.

P.S. This was spurred on because I’m in Pittsburgh this week attending Confluence, the annual design job fair at my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design. If you’re looking for exceptional young design talent, this is definitely a great place to start.

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I use Claude Code regularly to help me explore ideas and accelerate the realization of them. I like to think that I have more technical chops than your average designer, but I realize that I am no engineer. Putting aside how using LLMs makes me feel as someone that makes products for a living, it's hard to argue against what LLMs allow me to accomplish. This post is about that.

Anthropic recently introduced weekly limits to Claude Code to curb against excessive usage. In their communication on Twitter, they estimated that fewer than 5% of users would be affected by the change. Great! I've been on r/ClaudeCode, so I've seen the arcane machinations that people there construct around Claude Code. It seems perfectly reasonable to think that someone out there runs the tool as close to 24/7 as possible to maximize the value they get out of their subscription.

That's not me though. I have a full time job designing software. When I come home, a lot of the time, I want to play video games, tinker with my servers, and hang out with my cats and my friends. I have plentiful side projects, and LLMs let me work on those faster than I normally would be able to, but that amounts to 3-5 hours a day of concentrated time using Claude Code. Not even daily—we're talking 2-3 days on and 2-3 days off. Some weeks I don't do anything at all!

All that to say: I am a maker, not a hustler. Claude Code is a tool for me to accelerate what I was already going to do even if LLMs didn't exist.

This week, Anthropic released their newest model, Claude 4.5 Sonnet. It is apparently a pretty good model! Unfortunately, with it's release, Anthropic seems to have seriously nerfed the amount of tokens allotted to subscribers of Claude Code, even on their most expensive $200/mo plan, causing users to report chewing through their weekly allotment of Anthropic's previous—and arguably better—model Opus 4.1 in as little as a few hours.

This was new. I pay for the $200/mo plan and have never seen the weekly limit message since it was implemented, and I've only seen the session limit message a handful of times. It's worrisome that users are hitting these limits so quickly—and with no communication of changes—on a plan that costs such an astronomical amount of money.

And that's just it: communication is the primary thing that the Anthropic team is getting wrong. Just weeks ago, Anthropic confirmed degradations in the Claude Code service that users had speculated about for many weeks, if not a full month prior. This time, they managed to get out a statement (if you can even call tweets from personal accounts "statements") 24 hours after launch, but the gaslighting tone is not befitting of a company communicating to people paying $200 every month for their service. It’s condescending that their solution is to give people that are already paying $200 every month a way to pay more to keep using the service. Why was addressing this not in the launch plan? In what world is “haha cough up, paypig” an acceptable solution? Every product team knows the fervor of their users; did Anthropic think their paying customers just wouldn't notice this? Or did they simply not care?

Again, I make products for a living. I don't like accusing teams about not caring about their customers, because that's very rarely ever the case. But we know that AI subscription services are the twisted 2025 version of a loss leader, as Ed Zitron has written about extensively. From that perspective, these changes make sense. Claude Code is an overwhelming success for a company that had been struggling to find product-market fit against the aggressive and unyielding march of OpenAI just last year. (I interviewed there in 2024, I would know.) However, if every customer means you lose more money instead of making it, eventually you need to stanch the bleeding.

Despite all of this, I still generally like Anthropic as a company—at least, as much as one can and should allow themselves to like an AI company. I respect their approach to building products a hell of a lot more than OpenAI, whose driving product philosophy seems to be consume as much as you possibly can. But, I expect more respect and communication from a company that is taking $200 from me every month for a service that sometimes doesn't even work. If Netflix asked someone for $50/mo for a subscription, then suddenly stated that you could only watch 5 hours of TV a week before you lost all access to their service, people wouldn't just roll over and wait until next week to binge the next season of Stranger Things—they would cancel their subscriptions and sail the high seas.

I'm cancelling my Claude Code subscription—at least until Anthropic can clearly and respectfully communicate why they're making the decisions that they're making. If I'm realistically using Claude Code for 15 days a month because I am a normal human being with a life and a job and other interests, I shouldn't be punished as if I'm multiboxing eight Terminal windows simultaneously, sucking all the LLM juice that Anthropic's got. At $200/mo, I shouldn't even have to worry about the possibility. And yet, now I do.

How will I replace something that has actually increased my productivity tenfold? I don't know yet, but there's a good chance I won't. Maybe I'll go back to battling my ADHD-riddled brain to build things the slow, old-fashioned way. As my other essay will dive into, it's much more rewarding.

Or I'll buy an RTX Pro 6000 and pray that China keeps releasing good-enough models that can get me most of the way there. If I don't pay for Claude Code, the GPU will pay for itself in 24 months and I get to use it as much as I want!*

* I have solar panels.

There’s a separate conversation to be had here separate from the realities of Anthropic’s pricing today around the realities of subscription services, price hikes and the incongruent vision of AI that is being sold—or perhaps more accurately, force-fed—to us. Tech companies desperately want to realize a future where anyone can use these tools to build complete products, cure cancer, among other unimaginable far-off promises.

Given that we now have evidence that suggests that use of AI assistants contributes to cognitive decline, a scary picture begins to be painted. With students using AI more and more and not developing the skills (or attention span) to do things the slow, old-fashioned way, we’re setting ourselves up as a society for a dystopian future where humans have to pay tech CEOs whatever toll they demand of us so that we might effectively use our very own brains.

Hachikō is Fujii Kaze’s latest single and the first single off his upcoming album, Prema. It’s an upbeat tune borrowing the story of that Hachikō, who has a statue at Shibuya Station.

I think of it as a joyful story about missed connections and reconnecting with a loved one. “Where did you go, Hachiko? This time I’ll never let you go. We don’t need to rush, take it slow. This time I’ll never let you go.”

rendez-vous is a collab between dawgss and Aile The Shota—two acts I’d never heard of before—that was brought to me (and by extension, you) courtesy of the Youtube algorithm. I usually don’t like poppy, boy-band songs like this but I can’t deny how catchy this tune is.

Despite the upbeat tempo, this is actually a song about getting dumped. The singer reminisces about the time they spent together and wonders if the other person still remembers the time they spent together.

Propose by natori is another song by an artist I don’t normally listen to but it’s also incredibly catchy. The tempo is incredibly fast and the singer doesn’t even give much space to process what he’s saying. The natural rhythm of the song and the rhythmic singing style is incredibly fun to listen to.

This is a song about someone that’s head over heels for someone, being incredibly vulnerable in their head about whether they’re enough and how afraid they are of rejection. Through this lens, the rhythmic, yet unrelenting recital almost feels like a manic stream of consciousness as the singer tries to sort out how they feel.

I am incredibly familiar with yama and TORIHADA might be one of their best songs yet. It’s the lead single for their 2025 album ; semicolon, which is a strong contender for my album of the year so far. There’s nothing fancy happening here—this song is simply a bop.

This song is about choosing love: the singer falls deeply in love at first sight and all they want is to become closer to the other person. It’s very intimate and vulnerable, even somewhat assertive: “All I want is you, my skin tingles as we fall into the night—into a world of just the two of us.”

chelmico’s music is just plain fun and I just wanna dance with you — period is no exception. This is the perfect song for a laid back rooftop party in the middle of July.

All the other songs were kinda deep despite their upbeat demeanors but listen, this song is exactly what it says it is on the tin: “I just wanna dance with you — period. I don’t wanna do anything annoying. I don’t want to think about it. Don’t make me say it, you know it.”

Shiina Ringo’s new single 芒に月 (Awning Moon)/La Velada Legendaria (The Legendary Evening) is great, but the PV is stunning. Harsh lighting and smooth gradients everywhere, with AYA leading choreography for what is essentially a 6-minute dance number. Can’t wait to listen to the B-side.

Most photos exist together in logical groups; this trip or that event. It feels really good to just hit the photos page and get blasted with a wall of imagery though.

Geo lets me add things to albums later, so it should be fine, but maybe I don’t collect photos in “albums” but evolve them into Storehouse-like story pages. Or, there could be some different way of treating photos in a grid that implies a collection without explicitly putting them in a folder-like representation.

I’ll figure it out eventually!

I recently bought a new Sony lens for taking photos of an owl family near my house in San Francisco, and have been lamenting not having a place where I could confidently house those photos. One day on the hill someone asked, “What do you do with them, do you post them on Instagram?” —Well, I don’t have an Instagram account anymore, so no. Glass is great and I post there from time-to-time, but it feels like a gallery where I’m among legends and not a place I can toss my amateur shots. For years, the photos I’ve taken have just been for me.

Similarly, every once in a while, I begrudgingly log in to LinkedIn. I’m immediately bombarded by my peers—and friends—slinging hot takes that would have lived on Twitter in a different life, this time dressed in a suit and tie so that the thoughts feel “professional.” It makes my skin crawl. Despite that, I believe that there are world, cultural, and industry events that warrant conversation. With the death of Twitter, the migration to Mastodon, to Threads, to Bluesky, I no longer feel the same sense of security housing these fleeting thoughts in one of the now numerous internet town squares.

And the same for all of my other whims over the years; where do I store the music I’m obsessed with? The lyrics I translate? The electronics projects I’m working on? My forays into music production?

And so, here we are.

***

Why build something of my own instead of using Astro or Hugo or Jekyll? (We don’t use Wordpress and we definitely don’t use Substack.) Put simply, I am allergic to people’s bad software decisions. I am able to build something that fits my own needs and can evolve with them, and so why shouldn’t I?

I’m calling this CMS “Geo” for the time being, and it was mostly built by Claude Code under heavy supervision by me. I feel very icky about that! But, it did get the job done and I am able to write this post without dealing with flat Markdown files and committing things to Git. It’s rudimentary and not very well considered and rife with bugs, but it’s mine.

If I ever have time, I will clean up (or even rewrite) the code and separate it out into its own repository for others to use, but if you’re curious in the meanwhile, you can find the repository on GitHub.

If you’d like to keep up with things I write and post, you can subscribe to updates in your favorite RSS reader (lol) at https://jedmund.com/rss.

Thanks for reading!